Guild Leveling: Numbers

08Dec

First off, a special thanks to my twitter buddy, @Bryterside for hooking me up with the link to wowpedia.org where all of the numbers in the following analysis came from. That and hundreds of other source links as he’s almost always one of the first three people to respond when I have a question.

Now on to what we’re talking about today – numbers for guild leveling. One thing you’ll find “wrong” in the wowpedia article linked to about is that Blizzard decided that guild achievements were too much, so they removed their ability to boost you over the daily cap. So the cap is the cap, and that’s all there is to it. They were initially going to let us use guild achievements to go beyond the daily cap, but seeing this put into action on the live servers rather than the beta servers showed that the achievements made it far too easy to level your guild.

The change is good for all those who were worried that being in small guilds would make their members leave to join larger guilds who would have faster access to more perks, because now every guild falls into the same limitations. The only difference is that large guilds will (theoretically) hit the cap earlier each day than smaller guilds. The change is bad for those who are in large guilds who view this as a nerf to their advancement.

Daily Guild Experience Cap
So what is the cap? 6,246,000 experience can be earned for your guild every day, and only the top 25 people who earn experience can contribute to that total. So if you have 30 people in your guild earning guild experience but you don’t reach the cap, then the 5 people who contributed the least amount of guild experience do not have theirs calculated into the total. If you hit the cap with 26 people, but not 25, then you don’t hit the cap.

Once you have the cap met for the day it’s met for the day and that’s that, as it only counts the top 25 and if someone surpasses one of those 25 then you’re still already meeting cap because you’ve only earned more experience.

Thanks to Lerali in the comments below for pointing us to the source for the 25 player cap being removed. All experience earned for your guild is counted now, on all members, until the daily cap is reached each day.

Earning Experience
So we know what the limit is, so now we need to know how to actually earn that experience. The following information is taken directly from the wowpedia.org article I linked you to at the top, slightly modified for my personal layout preferences:

1 – Earning Guild achievements
2 – Boss kills in a raid or dungeon in which “most” of the party is from the same guild
3 – Rated Battleground or Arena wins in which “most” of the party is from the same guild
4 – Completing quests (dailies included) that reward experience
5 – An individual player’s faction reputation advancement
6 – An individual player’s profession progression

When you see the word “most” in that list, here’s what it’s talking about:

Now you’ll notice that this particular list above here is strictly the methods of which you gain the experience, not the actual values of how much you gain. That information I haven’t found yet, as I’m not sure anyone actually has that specific information this early.

How Quickly Can Your Guild Level?
So, just how fast can your guild actually level up then? Here’s a table to show you the absolute best case scenario; meaning that you’re hitting the experience cap every single day until you reach the cap of Guild Level 25. I haven’t found any information on how hard/easy it is to actually hit the cap every single day, so I don’t know if this is going to be exactly how you’ll work out or if it will take you longer.

Ok! I found it! It was a blue post made by Mumper back in September on the old WoW forums but I was able to find a blue tracker that had it archived. Here is the original (copy and pasted for you viewing pleasure!):

by Mumper | 17/09/2010 06:51:59
Mumper

There is no concept of “Top 20 contributors” anymore. We changed that functionality many months ago. XP contributed to the guild comes from all members. Guild rep is always available no matter what amount you have contributed to the guild.
Lead Content Designer

It does not include the window as there’s no way to judge how much you could have gotten in that time period. It’s possible to have gotten the full cap in those three hours if you had enough people on in the guild that rushed as much content as possible into that time window.

I’m surprised that the daily guild XP cap is so low. It’s easy to get to with just a handful of active players. I wonder if it is a certainty that the XP required is constant for all levels of guild leveling. One would think that it would go up with each level, like how it does for our characters.

The cap is low so that large guilds don’t completely blow away smaller guild on the progression.

The amount required does go up every level though as it does with players. That’s why it will take you 2.65 days to get to level 2, but 4.5 months to get to level 25 – because it continues to grow every level. You can find the experience requirements in the table at the bottom.

We have decided to remove the added bonus of gaining Guild Experience from Guild Achievements earned. This change will realign Guild Achievements with our philosophy held for normal Achievements, which are intended to be predominantly their own reward (barring the rare exception of special achievements that grant an additional reward.)

It appears that guild XP gained has been reduced to 25% of total gained, at least for questing. No Blue post on this but it’s been noticed in my guild. MMO-Champion is reporting it this morning http://bit.ly/ii3Yxi

We’re a small guild and it was bad enough they removed the guild XP from guild achievements. Now it’s even harder to get a lvl. As a GL, I’ve lost the excitement I had about the new system.

I still see a lot of potential for what’s going on right now. It’s not nearly as fast as it was going to be, and they took away some of the reason to do the bonus runs of old content and such, but I’m still optimistic. It stops it from being a grind, and instead turns it into a more natural kind of progression where the perks just come as you go along.

4.5 months is a heck of a time to wait for all the benefits, but at least they didn’t just scrap them all together.